The Earnest Methodist

GARFIELD BROMLEY OXNAM (1891-1963) was a bishop of the Methodist Church,
and a cover subject of Time, though it's hard to imagine the two
going together today. Billy Graham can fill the Sheep Meadow of Central
Park with listeners, and John Cardinal O'Connor can fill Fifth Avenue in
front of St. Patrick's Cathedral with protestors. But the Methodists, though
they are still the third largest church in America after Roman Catholics
and Southern Baptists, are simply off the map as far as the country's attention
is concerned. Robert Moats Miller's biography of Bishop Oxnam helps us
understand why.

Miller, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina,
has written the biographies of other Protestant churchmen, and familiarity
has bred, if not contempt, a querulousness that is a welcome relief from
the earnest tone of clerical life. Oxnam was destined to such a life at
birth. His father, a mine-owner, built chapels for his mining camps; his
mother was a charter member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union.
Bromley pledged himself to be a minister at a revival meeting when he was
seventeen. The Methodists gave him his preacher's license, and by 1936
he was elected bishop, the youngest in the church's history. He kept at
it until Parkinson's disease forced him to retire in 1960. Along the way,
he was a prime mover in the Federal (later National) Council of Churches
and Americans for Democratic Action, a supporter of FDR and Truman, and
a friend of John Foster Dulles.

Oxnam was known as a liberal churchman, which, in his day, did not necessarily
mean that he was a clone of Bishop John Spong. The modern schism between
liberal and conservative Protestants manifests itself in three areas: morals,
theology, and social action.

Oxnam lived before liberal Protestants went over the top on the Seventh
Commandment. He wrote about sex with a pre-Freudian innocence that is as
amusing to read as it is impossible to share. "I could look at a nude
woman, and think of her as an expression of God's beauty," he confided
to his diary, "but to look upon a woman who tantalizes you with her
charms . . . can only serve to lower her in my estimation and arouse that
which I strive to keep down." During his tenure as president of DePauw
University, Oxnam reluctantly allowed dancing. "There ought to be
fifty-seven things to do at a party besides dance," he told the student
who first raised the issue. Such as? the student asked. "One could
discuss the peace movement," Oxnam replied.

THEOLOGICALLY, Oxnam was a liberal by default, since he barely thought
of theology at all. Doctrinal discussions bored and annoyed him. He compared
them to "one monkey with a mirror flashing it in the eyes of another."

But on the third great dividing issue of the Protestant schism, the
religious significance of social reform, Oxnam was an archetypal liberal.
The turning point for him, as for many of his generation, was Walter Rauschenbusch's
Christianity and the Social Crisis, which Oxnam read in college.
"Someday," he wrote soon afterwards, "I am going to help
lead the church against the slums, their causes, etc. and smash them forever."
The slums lasted, but so did his determination to smash them. Slums, he
believed, were caused by unchecked capitalism. Though he was never a fellow
traveler in the manner of his fellow Methodist Harry F. Ward, he criticized
the industrial order as "unchristian, unethical, and anti-social,"
because it was based on "a direct appeal to selfishness." As
the years passed, his concerns became global as he called, fifty years
before George Bush, for a New World Order under the leadership of the United
Nations, which would in turn be inspired by the example of the United States.
"In international cooperation Old Glory will win New Glory."

What was liberal about these goals was not just their content, but the
degree to which they monopolized Oxnam's life. He thought of the pursuit
of slum clearance and peace, not as consequences of Christian belief, or
even as Christian duties, but as the substance of Christianity. "It
is the khaki of the Christ way of service that wins battles for the King."

Because Oxnam was not a thinker, when other people advanced different
goals, he reacted with incredulous scorn. He tussled with Catholics all
his life, equating "directives from Rome" with "directives
from Moscow." (Some of his Catholic opponents were no mean street-fighters
themselves; Cardinal Spellman called anti-Catholic liberals "unhooded
klansmen.") In one of his last major addresses, Oxnam foresaw an Interplanetary
Conference on Religious Faith, adding that "fundamentalism and papal
infallibility will have no place" there, though Martians would.

EVEN WHEN Oxnam's labors met with agreement from fellow Protestants,
or from the politicians he supported, the results of his endless activities
seem surprisingly slight now. The Methodist Crusade for a New World Order
was a years-long effort, involving hundreds of meetings, millions of pieces
of mail, and posters designed by Howard Chandler Christy, an artist most
remembered today for his depictions of what Oxnam would have called "nude
women." When it was done, Methodists congratulated themselves on their
role in bringing the UN into existence. Yet, despite years of reading books
about the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War, this is the
first time I have heard of the Crusade.

Oxnam's relationship with John Foster Dulles, his only trans-ideological
friendship, was played in a similar key. Dulles and Oxnam got along personally,
and Dulles was himself a Presbyterian layman active in the Federal Council
of Churches who shared Oxnam's hopes for a new world order. Yet when Dulles
became Secretary of State, he kept his own counsel, not the bishop's. "Oxnam's
hunger to be recognized by Washington's power elite," writes Miller,
"would be risible if it were not so poignant." The religion clause
of the First Amendment, it is clear, not only saves citizens from the domination
of uncongenial faiths, it spares churches the frustrations and embarrassments
of courting the powerful.

It also spares them from unkind turns of the wheel of history; unless,
like Oxnam's Methodists, they look for trouble. If all you want to do is
change the world, what do you do when the world changes (mostly in ways
you didn't anticipate)? G. Bromley Oxnam couldn't have said, and neither
could his church, which is one reason why he is history, and it is no longer
news.

RICHARD BROOKHISER is a Senior Editor at National Review and author
of The Way of the Wasp (Free Press).